"These voices?"

"Once there was a fox," said Raf, staring into a darkened case. "A dangerous and deadly ghost. Always waiting, always there." On the other side of the filthy glass a bootlace tasted the air with a sullen tongue. Around its nostrils splashed colours that no human eye could see. Knowledge Raf could tell Isabeau or keep to himself. "And then it wasn't."

"What happened?"

Raf looked at her. There were no colours hidden in her face. Nothing Isabeau couldn't see in her own reflection.

"To the fox?"

She nodded.

"Someone repaired the bloody thing . . ."

Hammered into a grassy bank between the ring road and the main fence surrounding the zoo were enamel signs every hundred paces or so, to warn visitors not to climb over. A crude silhouette of a wolf reinforced that message.

At the bottom of the track stood metal gates and on the far side of those, just before a main road, was a neat ornamental lake crowded with wading birds and waterfowl. Around the edge strolled what looked like smart Tunis. Girls walking hand in hand and young men with their arms around each other's shoulders in expressions of friendship that could only have been political back in Seattle.

A small wading bird with clockwork legs and a blue bottom raced across damp concrete and plopped into the lake, bobbing beneath the spray of a fountain on its way towards a tiny island in the middle. The concrete was damp because the fountain plumed straight out of the water and every gust of wind carried fine droplets towards the shore.

The scene was sickeningly normal.

"Let me buy you a coffee." Raf nodded to a low café across the lake, its tables almost as crowded as the paths. "Then you can tell me about Maison Hafsid and who these men were who came looking for me . . ."

In reply, Isabeau glanced at her wrist.

"You need to be somewhere else?"

Isabeau looked suddenly embarrassed, even slightly panicked; a blush suffusing her face. "No," she said hastily, "being here is good." They finished the stroll in silence. Only this time it was a quieter, less strained silence and could almost pass for friendship if not for the anxious glances she kept throwing in Raf's direction.

All that changed when Raf saw a child feeding bread to a duck. No one he'd ever seen before. Just a girl of about nine wearing a headscarf and feeding crusts to a duck so full it could barely waddle. She had long hair, tied back, white sneakers and cheap dark glasses that kept sliding down her nose. So wrapped up was she in watching the duck that the rest of the world might as well have not existed . . .

"Raf," said Isabeau. She was pulling at his arm.

"What?"

"What are the voices saying?" Worried eyes watched him. "And why are you staring at that child?"

"No reason," said Raf. And was shocked to discover he was crying.

"You miss your kid?" Isabeau demanded when the waiter had gone.

Raf put down his coffee, thought about it . . . "Yes," he admitted finally.

"Because he lives with his mother?"

"She," Raf corrected, "and I think her mother's dead."

"You think . . ." Isabeau tried hard not to be shocked. Divorce was more common in Ifriqiya than in other North African countries. But not in the way it was in the West. All the same, Isabeau obviously figured she'd know if a person she'd married was alive or not.

"You were married to her mother?"

"I've never been married," Raf said. "Although I was engaged once but that was to someone else." He caught Isabeau's expression and smiled. "It's a messy story," he said.

"They usually are." Glancing round the café terrace with its noisy children and couples relaxing after a stroll in Jardin Belvedere, she shrugged. "You don't have to tell me that." When Isabeau spoke again it was to ask a question that appeared to have been troubling her. Her voice was hesitant, as if Isabeau was uncertain of the wisdom of asking.

"You're not really who you say you are, are you? If you know what I mean . . ."

Inside Raf's head the other Raf grinned, all teeth and no smile. "Okay," it said smoothly, "answer that and stay human."

Raf couldn't. Which he guessed was Tiri's point.

The capuchin was milky, came in glass mugs and had a scum of thin froth across the top. Raf promptly embarrassed himself by mishearing the price and blithely handing the waiter a note roughly equivalent to U$5, a good portion of Raf's wages for that week.

"Does Your Excellency have anything smaller?" It was obvious the old man thought Raf was trying to impress Isabeau.

Raf shook his head. "Wednesday's payday," he said. "That's how I was given it."

"Must be a good job."

"Kitchen work, seven shifts in a row," Raf said wryly and saw rather than heard the old man suck his teeth.

"No so good . . . I'll get you change."

A dozen grubby notes and a fistful of change, some of it old enough to be real, arrived on a chipped saucer, while Raf and Isabeau sat at their table and watched two toddlers, an old man wearing a red felt chechia and a young woman cross the wooden bridge leading from the gates of Jardin Belvedere over a narrow strip of lake to where Isabeau and Raf sat nursing warm coffees.

At Raf's end stood a camera crew trying to film two laughing girls in red headscarves, arms tight around each other's waists as they strolled across the same bridge, but every time the girls got halfway some toddler would run into the shot or a passing family would halt and stare. Once, an old woman halted the two girls just as they reached the café end of the bridge. She wanted to ask them the time.

"Who are they?"

Isabeau snorted. "Now I know you don't come from around here," she said and named a famous Tunisian soap that had been running for eighteen years. "They've been friends since before kindergarten," Isabeau explained. "But their fathers have hated each other ever since Jasmine's father had Natasha's mother's kiosk at Gare de Tunis torn down because she hadn't applied for a tobacco-sellers' permit. So now they have to meet in secret."

"Are they lovers?"

Isabeau's eyes went wide. "Such things don't happen in Ifriqiya. Especially on television."

"Don't happen or aren't talked about?"

"Both," said Isabeau. And for a moment Raf was looking through a broken window into the darkened basement of her soul.

"So why the fear?" Raf asked.

Part of Isabeau obviously wanted to ask what fear? And for a second, Raf was afraid she might just get up and walk away. Instead she sipped at cold coffee and watched two twenty-three-year-old actresses pretend to be fifteen.

"In America," Raf said, "they'd close this café, hire extras to drink coloured water and have police tape off the road both sides of the gate. Everything would be done in one shot . . . The only people allowed near that bridge would be the actresses and the crew. And if the actresses decided to fuck each other it would be out of boredom."

"You've been to America?" Isabeau sounded disbelieving.

"Once," said Raf. "Years back. When I thought I was somebody else."

"Why tell me this?"

"Because I can?"

"And I can't tell anybody." Isabeau nodded, as if that was obvious. "Without you telling them about me . . ." Her voice was thoughtful.

"So Hassan doesn't know?"

"Hassan!" Raf could almost taste her irritation. "Oh, Hassan wants to marry me, all right. So he can get his hands on my quarter of the café." It took a second for Raf to work out that Isabeau meant the smoky tunnel in Souk El Katcherine where he'd first met Idries. "That won't be happening . . ."

"You already have a lover?"

The broken window was instantly back. The room inside darker than ever. As black as those places where the fox hid. In the days before Raf finally accepted that the fox was him.